XRP News

Great start to October with Bitcoin hitting an all time high of $125k over the weekend. As I write this on the full moon listening to the Waters Above podcast he is saying we could still see some volatility in the market but he’s expecting to see Bitcoin starting to climb higher in October to $130k on the conservative side and $160k on the extremely bullish side. Then we would need to see the Bitcoin dominance fall for alt season to commence. In terms of XRP Waters Above has a conservative price target of $10-$15 and a bullish price target of $20-25 this cycle. I don’t see this happening until November at the earliest and January at the latest. But we will see. So, now let’s get into the news.

Ripple Bank: Ripple’s application for a US banking charter licence from the OCC is now open for public review. Ripple is well on it’s way from being a blockchain start up to a bank. Apparently it’s very rare for banking licences to be granted so if successful Ripple will be well positioned to be the biggest company in terms of market capitalisation to go public which I expect they will do in the next couple of years.

Ripple becomes a qualified custodian: Ripple, Coinbase, BitGo, Wisdom Tree Funds now qualify as official custodians after the SEC’s no action letter (30th Sep). What does this mean? Under the Investment Advisory Act of 1940, advisors must keep client assets with a qualified custodian, usually a bank or a trust company with national fiduciary powers. The green light has been given for trillions of institutional capital to pour into digital assets.

David Schwartz steps down as Ripple CTO: David Schwartz, one of the architects of the XRP Ledger and the Ripple Chief Technology Officer announced he will be stepping down from this position. Does this mean his mission is accomplished? He said he’s not stepping away completely though as he has accepted a seat on the board at Ripple and will be an active member of the XRP community often still appearing at conferences.

Reverse carry trade: Jake Claver still says it’s a matter of when not if. The FOMC meeting is at the end of October around the same time as the Bank Of Japan announces it’s decision on interest rates. The Fed is expected to cut interest rates by 0.25% again. But will it be enough? That will largely depend on what the Bank Of Japan decides to do. Meanwhile Jake says watch oil… If the oil price spikes up dramatically then the BOJ will have to hike rates which will force the reverse carry trade to unwind in spectacular fashion.

XRP ETF’s: Plenty of XRP ETF news as October is the month when the first XRP ETF applications will be decided, starting with Greyscale on 18th October. We’re still waiting for BlackRock to throw their hat in the ring and Eleanor Terrett (former Fox Business crypto journalist) reported that Vanguard are looking to get involved which will be a huge deal as they didn’t enter the Bitcoin ETF market and after BlackRock are the biggest asset manager. Also the SEC’s system for automatically approving ETF’s is ready to go live. However, it’s unclear whether this will work when the US Government is shut down as it currently is.

The Crypto Basic headline in the following article which I took a screenshot of says: ‘Wisdom Tree says there will be a supply shock for XRP before Bitcoin’